Iris
Who hasn’t walked past the hulking structure at the corner of 2nd and Girard (no doubt on their way to Paesano’s) and peered through the windows for a glimpse inside the empty, cavernous behemoth that once promised a Pathmark for the grocery store-deprived denizens of NoLibs?
Developer Bart Blatstein, the visionary (or unscrupulous, seedy landlord depending on whose side you’re on) behind the revitalization of Northern Liberties, broke ground on the 51,000 square-foot building in 2010 when a series of failed negotiations and the bankruptcy of parent company A&P put plans on hold indefinitely as residents wondered if they were ever going to get their promised grocery store. In the über-trendy area, there’s no shortage of specialty food shops but there’s no one-stop-shop for everyday staples like paper products, dry goods, and the like–essentially putting the town of hipsters and foodies right smack in the middle of what is termed a ‘food desert’. A food desert is defined as any area in an industrialized world where healthy, affordable food is difficult to obtain and, from the looks of it, NoLibs was the Sahara–but last month the drought officially ended.
